


Sophie And The Mona Lisa Variant

by Radiolaria



Series: Meta Essays [9]
Category: Leverage
Genre: Archived From Tumblr, Archived From onaperduamedee Blog, Art, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Gen, Heist, History, Identity Issues, Meta Essay, Nonfiction, paintings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-15 05:03:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16926996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: A study in paintings, or how in-universe artworks can provide a reading of Sophie Devereaux.





	Sophie And The Mona Lisa Variant

**Author's Note:**

> Originally published on Mar. 30, 2015 on [onaperduamedee](https://onaperduamedee.tumblr.com/post/114978324133/of-sophie-and-the-mona-lisa-variant-im-so).

I’m so immensely thick at times: usually, cons provide a canvas for understanding thecharacters who run them or take the lead. _The Blue Line Job_ and Eliot, _The Gold Job_ and Hardison, _The 15 Minutes Job_ and Nate, _The Inside Job_ and Parker. Cons run by Sophie fall into two categories: gaslighting and art. Whereas the psychological cons generally reflect how much of a manipulative and “scary” thief Sophie can be, the art cons, rarer, toy with the ontological struggles of the character.

You know, “Not a forgery but a work of art”, “There’s fake, and then there’s _fake_ “, self-portrait of famous artist rumoured to have been destroyed, pivotal painting of a short-lived genius no one has ever laid eyes on… This speaks volume and the silence after is still Sophie.

An essential episode for Sophie, _The Two Live Crew Job_ , references no less than four paintings: _The Mona Lisa_ by Leonardo da Vinci, who gave its name to one of the heists performed during the episode; _Hygieia_ by Gustav Klimt, the painting the team attempts to recover for the Mercers; _Café Terrace at Night_ by Vincent Van Gogh, the target of Starke’s team; and “Dogs Playing Poker” a.k.a _A Bold Bluff_ by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge. And each of them is significant to Sophie’s decision to bury Sophie Devereaux.

 

* * *

 

 

 

_[Hygieia](http://www.klimt.com/en/gallery/early-works/klimt-hygieia-detail-aus-medizin-1900.ihtml)_ is a ghost. The haughty figure, depicting the goddess of good health Hygieia, is only a _detail_ of _[Medicine](http://chrisoatley.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Gustav-Klimt-Drawings-Medicine-ProgressFULL.jpg), _one of three paintings commissioned in 1894 by the University of Vienna for the ceiling of their grand reception hall. _Medicine, Jurisprudence_ and _Philosophy_ were deemed pornographic and perverted and never hung at the University. Separated, sold, moved, exhibited, reunited in galleries, outliving their creator, they were finally sent in 1943 to Immendorf Castle in Lower Austria as an attempt to spare them from the air raids on Vienna, along with more art pieces, and eleven of Klimt’s other works. In May 1945, the retreating German SS forces set the building on fire to keep the masterpieces from falling into Russian hands. Of the massive paintings, nothing is left save preparatory sketches and poor black and white photographs. _Medicine_ may have been slightly luckier in its fate: an oil composition draft and a colour photograph of _Hygieia_ alone remain.

_(source:[wikicommons](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hku_Klimt_Hygieia.jpg))_

So _Hygieia_ , little more than a Macguffin for Starke, the quest of a lifetime for the Mercers, is properly lost. The divergence between reality and fiction mirrors Sophie’s rapport with her own story – the truth does not exist in-universe, the re-writing becomes a quest. In the show, the painting is said to have disappeared after being saved from the Nazis and probably changed hands, from one rich bastard who did not care about the provenance to the other. In reality, this painting does not exist anymore and its echo is nothing more but a piece of a puzzle. The painting is a copy, there to highlight the absence of the original. And the original was so much larger.

 

> _Starke: You know, the Sophie Devereaux I knew, she'd never waste her time like this. What happened to her?_

The audience never saw Sophie Devereaux as she was prior to joining the team, Nate and Starke did. But Sophie Devereaux was never her true self, not with Nate, not with Starke: she is an identity amongst others, and in multiple versions. Sophie adapts to the people she works with, to the extent where Starke doesn’t recognise Sophie. Copy indeed. But the original, the Sophie from two years ago, was not an original either, or at least the tangible one. Sophie in this episode understands she hasn’t been herself for a long time, not when she was Sophie Devereaux with the team, or Starke, or Nate. The original is lost. And like the Mercers, Sophie starts an Odyssey to attempt to retrieve it.

The subject is significant as well: Hygieia, tall and proud, more femme fatale than Olympian in appearance, is shown in the original painting holding the cup of Lethe in her hand, the serpent dear to her husband/father Asklepios snaking around her arm. She’s part of the original Hippocratic Oath, healer and protector. But both the cup and the snake refer to oblivion and death as well –and given Sophie’s history with drugs and deaths, it’s really troubling to see the goddess holding these particular signs. Her affections, her animosity, her absence are equally dangerous. Sophie is very much the benevolent and capricious trickster who will protect her friends, but drive to madness her enemies.

Talking about madness: Hygieia’s attributes extend to mental health. And the Sophie of _The Two Live Crew Job_ was not in a good place, nor emotionally, nor mentally. She left, without a goodbye for the team or Nate: her stability was more important than Nate’s needs, but not the team’s. She remained in contact, but the cut did not stand contradiction: in the complete painting, Hygieia’s back is turned to the river of life, detached from the flow, where humans are floating, in a manner reminiscent of William Blake’s whirling Inferno. Sophie is selfish and cut from the world, immortal, to a certain extent, willing to let her loved ones struggle without her, to be the centre of the attention, reframing the entirety of the painting for her. Hygieia is restored to her rightful owners, but Sophie leaves eventually, not to be returned before the end of the season. In Sophie’s world, a fiction equates another:

 

> _Sophie: No, they're not just names, not to me. All my aliases, every one of them, I -- I know when their parents died. I know when they had their first kiss._

And Hygieia being lost is as real in-universe as Hygieia recovered.

 

* * *

 

The [“Dogs Playing Poker”](http://www.dogsplayingpoker.org/gallery/coolidge/a_bold_bluff.html) painting is part of a series of 16 similarly-themed paintings (dogs doing human stuff) commissioned in 1903 by Brown and Bigelow for advertising cigars: this one is appropriately called "Judge St. Bernard Stands Pat on Nothing" and constitutes the prequel to "Judge St. Bernard Wins on a Bluff" picturing Judge St Bernard, later during the game, winning, as his opponents sourly look down his weak hand displayed before them. The paintings were later renamed by Brown and Bigelow’s marketers as “A Bold Bluff” and “Waterloo”. Two different versions of “Waterloo” exist, with minor adjustments, like a poodle bringing drinks. Both paintings were sold in 2005 at auctions to a private owner, for $590,400, setting record for the series. This is supposed to be “dogs playing poker”, that’s all.

_(source:[wikicommons](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Waterloo_Dogs_Playing_Poker.jpeg))_

Except it’s far from just that. Those dogs are part of an entire series, and a short story –with suspense, cigars, bluff, and poodles-, and a re-writing even, if one considers the renaming and two versions. What does it say about the central character of the episode, Sophie Devereaux, one alias out of an infinity, whose second act ends in a death, whose every word is a re-writing, a rectification? Sophie Devereaux is precisely that, a part of a whole, the whole being different variations of herself; her aliases are tools in a campaign led by herself, for herself, in which she is both advertiser and product. There is the hitch; Sophie diffracted is smoke-screen and entertainment:

 

> _Sophie: I'm a grifter. For better or worse._ _  
> _ _Nate: You're searching for something.  
>  _ _Sophie: Nate, I... Oh, I feel like such an idiot, but, I feel a little bit lost right now._

Being a grifter means being whoever she needs and wants to be. And as of the team’s reunion, it’s not enough. Being everything, a palette of women, a play in five acts, a tabula, is distracting from her self.

The painting is also hilarious: “it combines elegance and style with a, with a classical imitation of legitimate enterprise, parody”. Those are the words Sophie would use to describe her trade, and probably herself, but they apply perfectly to the piece. Sophie may look flabbergasted upon seeing what they accidentally stole, but truth is, it fits. Sophie is nothing but a vast _bluff_ as well. Her profession mostly is a poker game, with what it implies in terms of manipulation, dissimulation and theatrics.

There is at last an observation to make about the process that landed this particular painting in the team’s lap: a swap. Paintings being there and not there, being others than what they should be… Starke thought of hiring Sophie because he believed she still was a thief, Chaos tried to blow her up because he thought she was still a thief, Sophie thought she was being targeted because she was a good guy now, and Starke’s conclusion:

 

> _Starke: Oh, please. You ran a couple of cons, you committed about 12 felonies trying to blackmail me, and you handed over a stolen masterpiece just to get what you wanted. You're still thieves._

At the end of the day, Sophie still was buried under _another name_ than the one she decided to bury: Katharine Clive was replaced by Sophie Devereaux on her headstone. Like changing the names of painting to sell better. When Sophie says she doesn’t know who she is anymore, she doesn’t bluff.

 

* * *

 

The _[Café Terrace at Night](http://www.vangoghgallery.com/catalog/Painting/53/Caf%C3%A9-Terrace-on-the-Place-du-Forum,-Arles,-at-Night,-The.html) _at the heart of the heist has less of a dramatic story, but not less fascinating in regard to Sophie. It features for the first time in Van Gogh’s paintings the now famous starry night. It’s a night picture, yet Van Gogh didn’t use black: “Here you have a night picture without any black in it, done with nothing but beautiful blue and violet and green, and in these surroundings the lighted square acquires a pale sulphur and greenish citron-yellow colour”, he explains in a letter to his sister from 1888. Talk about absence and substitution… And Sophie, all clad in black in her mourning clothes, standing before the enlarged painting on the screens. Funerals are not black, they are colours disguising as black.

_(source: wikicommons)_

_Café_ is also possibly inspired by a description from Maupassant’s _Bel Ami_ : “I say this because the beginning of _Bel Ami_ happens to be a description of a starlight night in Paris with the brightly lighted cafés of the Boulevard, and this is approximately the same subject I just painted”, Van Gogh writes in the same letter. And _Bel Ami_ tells the story of the irresistible rise in society of a young and ambitious man in the Paris of the Belle Époque, between lovers, jobs, schemes… One of Literature’s great grifters. Everyone is probably a great grifter to Sophie. But the link is interesting. Sophie would know about the link between Van Gogh’s innocuous terrace in the moonlight and a classic of French literature. Sophie creates stories for herself: where there is a story, there is a grift to pull. A stray thread to unravel the whole canvas, or follow back to the treasure. Except _Bel Ami_ ’s thread brings excitement and people and Paris, the Café thread gets lost in solitude and night and Arles…

There is an unusual depth to the picture, an accentuated perspective often absent from Van Gogh’s works. The lines seem to run toward a window, a door to the inside, while on the right the wandering eye gets lost in the shadows of the sleeping city. The vanishing point is inside, or on the window casement, but the composition stirs the eye towards the unknown, the darkness, the city. And Sophie fled to find herself elsewhere, to retreat inside herself. The eyes cannot tell what one could find inside the café, or roaming the streets. You would have to go to Arles…

A deserted café in Arles, distant, undistinguishable figures in the back; no one is close enough, no one seems to be concerned with the eye of the viewer. It’s France, at night, quietly festive. This could well be one of the numerous cafés that nestled Sophie’s doubts during her exile. Except the narrative introduced it as a ploy; there are five of them and they are to deceive, as if to warn of the futility of the undertaking. Coming back, Sophie will have to announce success with her real name, like the team announced which was the real painting to the authorities, but her real name will be of little importance to the person she chose to be for her team, just like the Van Gogh was only a tool to get back the Klimt.

 

* * *

 

 

> _In 1911 the Mona Lisa was stolen and the con man who did it made six identical copies.  
>  _ _And then they put them on the black market, and each buyer thought that they had the original._

[The Mona Lisa scam](http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1894006,00.html) alludes in fact to two distinct events: in 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia, an employee at the Louvre museum, stole the painting before visiting hours and brought it back to Italy, allegedly as a patriotic gesture. The theft was only discovered a day after by the staff, causing the museum to close for nine days and the French border soon afterward. The French investigators turned the country upside down in search of the painting; it was suspected to be already everywhere outside. Apollinaire became implicated through a dubious con artist and Picasso was even questioned. Without a trail to follow, the painting was well and truly lost. It was recovered only two years after, when Peruggia tried to sell it in Florence. The painting toured Italy before going back to France, with a new iconic status. To this day, little is known about whether or not Peruggia received help for the theft of the century. But in 1932, an American journalist wrote for the _Saturday Evening Post_ about his encounter back in 1914 with a con man named Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno who had orchestrated the whole theft and forged six copies of the masterpiece to be sold separately. The Mona Lisa variant was born. Except there is no proof Valfierno and his copies existed…

_(source:[monalisadocumentary](http://monalisadocumentary.blogspot.fr/2012/06/80-years-ago-today-birth-of-phony.html))_

Dual story-telling, copies, false trails, absence; this is pretty much Sophie’s story. This idea there is no way of telling which painting is the original, which story is the fantasy of a journalist, the self-justification of a thief. Sophie Devereaux is a persona Nate happened to know: this is the only reason for the team to know her. Had he known Indira McCallister, they would have learnt to trust and love Indira McCallister, not Sophie. None is the original. Even Sophie Devereaux exists in several versions: Nate’s from before, Starke’s, the team’s. And Sophie comes to realise there is, at this point in her life, no justification for this diffraction. Not for fun, because that’s what it is, making up stories, stealing, grifting. Not for the team, because the very doubts that have been seizing her keep her from doing her job.

And if she cannot do her job, at this point, she has no reason to be with them. She is Sophie/Anna/Annie/Portia/Jenny: it always changes, the way she introduces herself. The constant is her skill –grifter, thief, con woman. Sophie loves her team but is not yet able to picture her being part of the team _just_ out of love. Her skill justifies her presence; and the moment she is not stable enough to do it, she leaves. Or you could go with the story of the woman faking her death and going on a voyage of self-discovery across Europe. Dual stories, always: Peruggia was hailed as a hero in his country (for bringing back to home a painting that was actually bought by François Ist for a steep price), or Valfierno hired him to create the publicity stunt allowing him to sell six times the same painting.

The show decided to play Valfierno’s story straight, which means that in-universe there are six Mona Lisas currently non-accounted for. The truth does not exist in-universe, the re-writing becomes a quest. More absences to explain. More swapping and copies. More mysterious and nameless brunettes running around the world, exciting the imagination of everyone…


End file.
